Which Path Will South Korea Take?
Amid the “fire and fury” of 2017, South Koreans fretted over a perilous sense that the country was being bypassed. So far this year, however, President Moon Jae-in seems to be “in the driver’s seat,” or at least with a hand on the wheel, in steering a dramatic diplomatic effort at peace and denuclearization. These recent developments render this new book by Scott Snyder, a longtime Korea watcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, remarkably timely.
He uses an elegant framework of South Korea’s desire for autonomy and need for alliance as the essential tension in near every major foreign-policy decision since its birth as a state 70 years ago. In a sense, his real subject is not South Korea per se, but its alliance with the US. Snyder explores littleknown passages, like the early 1980s origins of the US “nuclear umbrella” as something designed not to protect Seoul against Pyongyang but rather to prevent Seoul from pursuing its own bomb — as it had been doing. Snyder lays out the foreign-policy strategies of the last decades, and his chapter on the 2008-2013 Lee Myung-bak administration is probably the most incisive treatment of that period in English.
Finished before the Trump-moon era, the book does not dictate a path forward for Korea, though Snyder argues that full autonomy, in the sense of ending the Us-south Korea alliance, is not a viable option. But his rich and balanced treatment of South Korea and its US alliance gives readers a viewing point from which to look for themselves at the road ahead.
Global Asia.